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Robert Gambier Bolton – Ghosts in Solid Form

Q. We often hear you use the word ‘Spheres’. Can you give us any information concerning them: their number for instance, where they are situated, and if you can pass from one to the other at will?

A. Their exact number I cannot tell you, but I will endeavour to answer the other portions of your question to the best of my ability. We find it extremely difficult to explain matters of this kind to you, on account of the limitations of your languages on earth ; and are therefore forced to use terms and illustrations which will make our explanation simple, although perhaps not giving to you quite so full or so accurate a description as we should wish.

Now, to deal with your question. It is sufficient for you as mortals to know of "the seven spheres of active life" which succeed your earth-life.

The earth as you now know is round, and you can therefore picture to yourselves these seven spheres as grouped round it in ever- widening circles. …………….The sphere or plane of dynamic energy nearest to earth, you can call the first sphere, and this is the one to which the majority of mortals are attracted when they pass out of their earth-bodies, and commence their life of progress — or the reverse — in " the spheres of active life."

But those amongst you who have for ever cast off the shackles of all the false creeds and dogmas of earth; you who are making good progress along the free and open road of spiritual knowledge — "the enlightened ones," as we call you — should make it your endeavour to so live your lives here and now, that when you leave your earth-body for the last time you should at once pass through this First Sphere without pause ; should open your eyes in the Second Sphere, having left all undesirable earth-conditions  behind you for ever as you passed from earth. Let this, then, be your aim during the few years of life on this planet which still remain to you.

There is with us a fixed and immutable law that we may all pass downwards, as you would say, to the sphere or spheres below the one in which we are living, and when we choose to do so, just as I have done tonight in coming to meet you here; but none can pass upwards, as you would say, to the sphere or spheres above them, until the appointed hour has arrived for each entity to do so.

We often hear you quote the words of your poet, "there is no death." That is perfectly true so far as regards the views you hold concerning the change which takes place at the end of your earth-life, and which you term "death " — a change, by the way, which is identical with the one which occurs at the commencement of your earth-life, and which you term ‘birth’.

But, although there is no "death " in the sense in which you employ that word, either in your sphere or in ours, something analogous to it occurs with each of us in our sphere when the appointed hour for our transition to a higher one arrives ; for on opening our eyes, after passing through this change, we find ourselves in a far grander sphere than the one which we have left, no matter how beautiful, how perfect, that sphere may have appeared to us to be.

And this will continue, we understand, throughout the ages ; each entity progressing in its sphere until the period of training in that sphere is completed, when it at once passes to the next sphere above them : progressing ever upwards. We can always return to the spheres below us, as I have already said, but we can never pass to a sphere above us until our appointed hour arrives.

You will find this well described in the book. Through the Mists  which one of us gave to you people of earth through the brain and hand of Robert James Lees.